Fabric of the Future: Women Visionaries of Today Illuminate the Path to Tomorrow [Hardcover]

M. J. Ryan (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1998

Joan Borysenko, Brooke Medicine Eagle, Shakti Gawain, Starhawk, Gloria Steinem, and Marianne Williamson are among the contributors to this essential collection of wisdom for the new millennium designed for today's women. Radio drive-time tour.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As the millennium clatters toward us, optimists and doomsayers struggle over its symbolism as a new beginning or a fiery end. The all-female cast of contributors to The Fabric of the Future includes New Age matriarchs like Shakti Gawain and Brooke Medicine Eagle and thinkers drawn from a variety of life paths, such as Angeles Arrien, Joan Borysenko, Flor Fernandez, Gloria Steinem, and Nancy Mairs. Editor M.J. Ryan voices a collective impatience over the mounting anxieties of an age that seems to be spinning out of control. "I became tired with all this breaking down--I wanted to know what was breaking through," she writes. Luisah Teish chides the cultural tourism that has many New Agers rather arrogantly appropriating sacred symbols and practices of peoples around the globe, reducing them to "the fleeting diversions of Western spiritual adolescents." Only "a radical shift in conscience as well as consciousness" can wrest the future from the excesses of the past, she insists. Dawna Markova celebrates the power of stubborn will, the possibilities inherent in disillusionment, and the paradox of embracing the unknown to tap a more fluid intelligence than the one available to those who move through life on autopilot. The Fabric of the Future has its share of repetition and half-baked thought, but wins out by joining solid consideration of how the past has shaped the present with fresh perspectives on what we might aspire to in the hereafter. --Francesca Coltrera

From Publishers Weekly

Bringing together essays by 40 women from a spectrum of ethnic and spiritual backgrounds, Ryan, executive editor of Conari Press, offers a welcome antidote to the predictions of gloom and doom frequently heard as the year 2000 approaches. The volume's overriding theme is a coming radical shift from our current morass of violence and materialism to a partnership society in which women will revitalize such values as peace, respect for the earth and the importance of child rearingAwhich, for some of the more historically minded essayists, will right an ancient wrong. The essays, by such noted authors as Jean Houston, Joan Borysenko and Brooke Medicine Eagle, describe creative, nonmechanistic lifestylesAsome of which have been practiced by Native cultures for thousands of yearsAas our only alternative if humans are to make it to the next stage of our evolution. Many contributors' sentiments echo the words of Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy: "I consider it an enormous privilege to be alive now, in this Turning, when all the wisdom and courage we ever harvested can be put to use and matter supremely." While cynics will be likely to dismiss many of the claims made here, there is plenty of wisdom in these pages to add to the harvest, and readers will likely close the book looking for ways to hasten the coming change. Photos. 40,000 first printing; author tour. (Oct.) FYI: The publication of The Fabric of the Future marks the 10th anniversary of Conari Press, which considers the book a culmination of its mission to produce literature for positive change.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 460 pages
• Publisher: Conari Pr; 1St Edition edition (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573241296
• ISBN-13: 978-1573241298
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,961,734 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)